A collection of thoughts, quotes, questions, and struggles in the midst of faith, risk, and (im)possibility...

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Caputo on experience...

"...experience in the positive and maximal sense, experience that is really worth its salt... is not for mediocre fellows. The easy humdrum drift of everydayness is experience only in the minimal and negative sense that we are not stone dead, fast asleep, dead drunk, or completely unconscious, although sometimes, it seems, we might just as well be. Experience is really experience when we venture where we cannot or should not go; experience happens only if we take a chance, only if we risk going where we cannot go... precisely where taking another step farther is impossible...

The full intensity of experience, the fullest passion, is attained only... when a power - which here is "thinking" - is pushed to its limits, indeed beyond its limits, to the breaking point, to the point where it breaks open by colliding against what is beyond its power."